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Think of your favorite board game. Maybe it’s chess? Or Clue? Or Hungry Hungry Hippos? Now imagine it brought to life. No more fighting over who gets to be the battleship or the dog – in the case of Monopoly – because you and your friends are the pieces. And it’s your city’s public spaces that form the board.
Gentrification: The Game! – created by the artist collective Atmosphere Industries – recently took over Toronto’s Kensington Market as part of Pedestrian Sundays. For this SUMMER SHORT, reporter Andrew Walsh brings us the sounds of the game, while producer Mieke Anderson catches up with one of the game’s creators, David Fono, to talk about the importance of public play-time and tackling the subject of gentrification.
Note: Atmosphere Industries invites anyone interested in exploring making big/public-space games of their own to get in touch!
Links to stuff from Spacing Radio’s Summer Shorts 015:
- NYC’s Come Out & Play festival
- London’s Hide&Seek festival
photo by Kevin Steele
One comment
Right up front, you get to hear the assumptions that determine everything — it is assumed that developers and pitted against residents, and that any retailer that isn’t a one-off, like a chain coffee shop, is “bad.”
It was disappointing.